Introduction to the History of Photography

  Portrait, Washington Square Park, 1917   Pears and Bowls, 1916 Wild Iris, Maine, 1927      Wall Street, 1915     Portrait of Georges Braque, 1957 The “full acceptance” of reality is the method and goal of the photographer, observed Paul Strand. However, full objectivity has to be something different from a passive receptivity but must emerge from an active and vigilant attitude that requires the photographer’s control of his subject. Or rather, it requires the coming together of subject and object in the intervening space of the photograph, synthesizing and perhaps transcending both, a mediating space, both familiar and unusual, made of masses and voids, light and shadows, made of the equivalence of presence and absence,  of correspondences of vision and forms in the world, of the coalescence of equivalent forms in a frame, of a spatialized time and a space of  gradually superposed temporalities. Marc

Ansel Adams by Dorothea Lange Group f/64 Manifesto The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group. The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group. Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group. Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those worke

actress, 1930   Large body curves , about 1922-28 untitled, 1930   Railrod tracks at night, about 1930 Gelatin silver print Homagem to Max Ernst, 1937, collage Total Panic II, 1937, collage Franz Roh’s involvement with art extended from history, theory and criticism to production, which took the form of both “reality-photos” that captured the expressive and symbolic potential of fragments excerpted from the real world and experimental techniques—including negative printing, photomontage and collage—that enhance our capacity to experience the world visually. Although his career as a critic grew out of his ability to describe the characteristics of art movements in terms of the juxtaposition of opposites, the works of art he created demonstrate his ability to explore a multiplicity of approaches. The critic who proclaimed the waning of Expressionism and the rise of Magic Realism in post-war painting was also the artist who delighted equally in the objec

http://wiedler.ch/felix/books/story/680 Franz Roh, Jan Tschichold: Foto-Auge / Oeil et Photo / Photo-Eye Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1929 printer: Heinrich Fink, Stuttgart size: 30 x 21 cm photographer: El Lissitzky (cover) designer: Jan Tschichold

The advent of the portable camera allowed for changes in the practice of photography, in the methods and goals of photographers.  Photography leaves the comforts of the studio, its tempo or rhythms, its formal ideas and established procedures and searches for novelty in the cadences, the pulses and figures of everyday life. Photographers such as Giuseppe Primoli and Paul Martin stand in between the amateur art of their predecessors and the developing discipline of photojournalism, as observed by I. Jeffrey (1).    Roma - Via Ostiense 1890 self-portrait of Giuseppe Primoli photographing the flooded street The informal, the improvised, the ephemeral are made into new plastic values translating the energies of urban life, the heterogeneous world of modern civilization unified in the commodity form of its material products and social exchanges, and similarly equalized in the “democratic” vision of the camera, a vision more and more unconcerned with distinctions o

James Craig Annan, 1864-1946 The Dark Mountains | Camera Work | 15 x 20.2 cm | 1904 James Craig Annan, 1864-1946 Prof. John Young of Glasgow University | Camera Work | 19.9 x 15.5 cm | 1904 James Craig Annan, 1864-1946  Gitana - Granada | Camera Work | 19.5 x 13.7 cm | 1914     JAMES CRAIG ANNAN was a master photogravure printer and a leading pictorialist photographer around the turn of the twentieth century. He produced most of his own work as well as that of others in the photogravure process, which he learned from its inventor, Karl Klíc. Annan was the son of photographer Thomas Annan, known for his early documentation of the slums of Glasgow. He joined his father's business at a young age and began assisting in studio portraiture and photographic reproductions of artwork. In 1883, he and his father traveled to Vienna to study with Klíc, T. & R. Annan and Sons of Glasgow soon became Britain's foremost gravure printing establish